FIRST DRAFT OF `HUCKLEBERRY FINN' HAS THE LITERARY WORLD SPINNING

Deirdre Carmody, New York Times News ServiceCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The battle among book publishers for the rights to the original draft of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which includes unpublished material, has begun in earnest now that the three parties claiming ownership have reached their own settlement.

The discovery in 1990 of the first half of the handwritten manuscript, which had been presumed lost for more than 100 years until it was found in a California attic, provides a gold mine for scholars.

Victor Doyno, a professor of English and American literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo and president of the Mark Twain Circle of America, likened it to "the British finding a working manuscript of `King Lear' or `Hamlet.' "

Publication of the first piece of the manuscript is scheduled for the fiction issue of The New Yorker, which comes out June 19. It involves a conversation in a cave between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the runaway slave. They discuss ghosts, and Jim describes a terrifying experience in a morgue in which he wrestles with a corpse.

"It is morbid, but it is brilliant, and it works as a self-contained story and a magazine piece," said Bill Buford, fiction editor of The New Yorker, who declined to say what the magazine paid for rights to the piece.

Book publishers are now racing for rights to the draft, but the squabble over rights dates to 1885, when James Fraser Gluck, a young attorney in Buffalo, N.Y., began to assemble a collection of manuscripts and letters of important authors of the English-speaking world.

He wrote to Samuel L. Clemens-who used the nom de plume Mark Twain and who 15 years earlier had been editor and part-time owner of The Buffalo Express-and asked him to donate material to the library in Buffalo.

Clemens replied by sending the second half of the original draft of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which had been published earlier that year. He said he thought the first half had been destroyed by the printer.

Two years later Clemens found the first half and sent it along. Gluck apparently took it from the library, intending to have it bound, but failed to return it.

He died the following year and the manuscript, which had no library markings, was turned over to his widow by the executors of the estate. She eventually moved to California to be near her daughter and the trunk containing the manuscript went with her. It was finally opened by Barbara Testa.

The manuscript was taken to Sotheby's in 1991 for authentication. At this point, the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library claimed the manuscript, while the Mark Twain Foundation in New York City laid claim to the intellectual property rights.

A settlement was reached in which Testa and sister Pamela Lindholm, the library and the foundation agreed in essence to split proceeds from the material.

A most important aspect of the newly discovered manuscript is that it is filled with revisions in Clemens' handwriting-some passages written over as many as four times-and illustrates his process of work and his changes of mind. (One chapter in the manuscript was eventually removed from Huckleberry Finn and ended up in "Life on the Mississippi.")

Another change involves the "Notice" at the beginning of the novel: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." The early draft does not contain the part about a moral.

"I think in the very beginning he had not planned to have it be a novel of Jim's liberation," said Doyno. "And only after it became an important book about human liberation and developing individual integrity did he put in the middle phrase about people intending to find a moral."